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i know the privacy concernes they may have, but they would never do anything bad to you.
Seriously?
So;
Google would never….
And that’s just the stuff I know about and could find quickly,
Their search used to be amazing, now it’s shit.
If you disagree, I’m sorry you can’t remember when there was a time that it was infinitely better. It was so good, in fact, that their name actually became a verb. Crazy, right?
They’re slowly killing Waze by removing features. Believe it or not, that app used to be even cooler too.
That. That’s why.
Their search used to be amazing, now it’s shit.
Yeah, have to agree on that. Especially if I'm looking for something niche. It used to be the opposite, you went to google if you were looking for something hard to find.
Bing seems to be a lot better for my search needs right now. Duckduckgo is just... a mess if you ask me. No relevance to results whatsoever, I usually find what I was looking for in the 10th link or so... or not at all. After 10, 15 results, duckduckgo just returns irrelevant results.
The image search in Google has gotten better though, so I still use that.
Google buying then killing services, probably their strongest skill. >>> https://killedbygoogle.com/
Chromium is open-source. Chrome is not and also happens to constitute a majority of the browser market, and Google has tried multiple times to cash in on this market share to benefit their primary business of advertising to the detriment of users (FLoC, Manifest v3, Web Environment Integrity).
Likewise, AOSP is open-source, but Google has been progressively dismantling it and making various components closed-source (most recently the dialer app).
All this to say, Google is absolutely not friendly to FOSS. As a corporation, they're beholden to their shareholders above all else and they should be treated as an amoral entity, the same as every other publicly-traded company.
Chrome itself isn't the real problem, how they managed to get Chromium everywhere is. You have one real alternative and that's Firefox (and derivatives) and it's barely surviving, which sucks.
Sure, they might not get as much money directly from non-Chrome browsers, but they get to push standards through Chromium.
they will give incredibly private information to the highest bidder
That would be bad for business. Why sell data to the highest bidder once when you can insert yourself in their value chain and seek rent forever?
"but they would never do anything bad to you"
Oof, can I get this in writing? I, a massive company beholden to no one, promise to never evar backstab my loyal customers, pinky swear.
But… their motto is “don’t be evil”! Surely, you can trust that!
/vomit,
Well, they're at least honest - they quietly changed their motto few years ago, now they can be evil.
I can imagine some exec being like "oof, finally I can be evil, after all these years!"
Huh, I guess there are some stupid questions.
I swear some people take it as a challenge.
Edit: nah, there is literally no way this guy's not trolling, and badly at that.
Because they are an advertising company.
With all that been said here, they also killed xmpp with hangout, so they're not friendly to Foss at all.
Personally Google gives me a negative impression due to its intrusiveness and current aim of hoovering up all data possible. While you seem certain Google would never hurt you, there are many people who would never take such a risk. Even if Google was purely good of heart (which I doubt), they have proven themselves subjects to Government whims. A recent example is here: https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/18/google_keyword_search_warrants/ where a court in the United States ordered Google to return personally identifying information on any and all users who searched for the address of a crime in the month prior. And their commitment to open source is debatable as shown by their graveyard of projects (https://killedbygoogle.com/) often killed with strong usage and with dubious explanations really has strong Embrace, Extend, Extinguish vibes.
Because their main purpose is to collect as much personal information as they can from their users and sell it to anyone willing to pay for it.
Because they are above all else an advertising company. Businesses like having somewhere to advertise, of course... but overall consumers don't like ads. Chrome, Android and gmail are simply ways to steer people to google search so they can sell ads. Then, like Facebook, their bread and butter is essentially privacy invasion - gathering huge dossiers of personal information on everyone they can. Google also has a reputation for being somewhat arrogant, as far as their work culture (only hiring people from elite universities, and having ridiculous 'clever' interview questions) as well as launching products, getting people to depend on them, then cancelling them with little notice or replacement. In addition, while their main product was innovative for the first several years, it's declined significantly in quality, but their near-monopoly status makes it difficult for anyone else to effectively compete. Another issue is that like Facebook, Google has basically no customer service for anyone not spending 5 million a month with them. If they decide to close down your account based on who-knows-what algorithm thing, unless you get lucky on social media or have good connections, you're screwed and all your stuff is permanently deleted.
People tend to dislike google because they collect a ton of data on you and you can't ever be sure they aren't selling it to other companies.
You can be absolutely sure they’re selling it to every company and national government that will pay for it.
If you’re part of a marginalized group that some government would like to commit a human rights violation against in the last decade, chances are Google was a gleeful enabler on the government side.
I worked for a certain “big data” company that bought browsing histories from Google (and many other companies). They absolutely sell your data; and without even anonymising the personal identification information before selling it.
(I lasted 6 weeks before the lack of ethics forced me to quit. Needed the job to pay rent and buy groceries, but I couldn’t buy enough soap to cleanse my soul).
One more thing concerning the 'open source'. Most things Google does aren't open.
You mentioned Chromium. I don't think it would have become the most used browser platform if it hadn't been open. So I'm not sure if it's a gift or marketing decision. They kinda use it to spy on people/track behaviour. And push the web-standards they like. It's part of their strategy to retain control over every part along the way and dominate the internet. From servers, to network infrastructure to the end users device and even their software that displays the webpages.
With Android they take extra care to move more and more things into their propretary Google Services. I think the Calendar is kinda unmaintained, the ASOP keyboard is very bare. Half the Apps don't work without Play Services, Push Notifications are an important part of todays world but proprietary. The camera doesn't even have half it's capabilities and the Play Store is set to assert control over the ecosystem. Contactless Payment doesn't work with open source, ....
With Google, their open source always comes with strings attached. They're not doing it for your benefit.
If you compare it for example with Meta, they just give away PyTorch, React and their Llama2 models because they can and it' beneficial to them. I don't see too many strings attached there.
But Google has a few of those, too. TensorFlow, Kubernetes, Gerrit, Angular and the two or three programming languages.
If you like being dominated and the future of the web being shaped for you by a single company, or your wants and needs align well with their motives, I don't have any objections, though.
I love open source too, but this:
i know the privacy concernes they may have, but they would never do anything bad to you.
Is just super problematic. I appreciate the enthusiasm for open source, but google is a monopoly actively involved in making the internet worse in order to profit from it. They do this by leveraging your personal information, and that's bad.
I'm not sure where you were during the time of the Snowden revelations, but I invite you to look it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disclosures
A few things to go down the rabbit hole on:
Basically, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and host of other American companies collect a lot of information about citizens. So much in fact that the US government decided it was good to have access to it. That, and many other things, were revealed by Snowden and other patriots.
The information has been sold to insurance companies to modify their premium for certain groups of the population. It is used to profile minorities, track activists, intimidate political opponents, fund wars abroad, and so much more. It even affects how people vote, which means that companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter have tangible influence on elections.
When the Nazis invaded countries, they used the information gathered by governments to find the Jews, and we know what happened afterwards. It was Jews then, but what if you happen to be the group targeted in the next upheaval?
Google (and companies like it), also like to use their power to snuff out competition which slows down innovation.
The world isn't black and white. Google does amazing things, good things, but it also does many bad things. For those who care, the bad things outweigh the good. It's like drug cartels in Brazil, Colombia, and other countries: they build schools, enforce their own laws, invest in infrastructure, have political candidates, and sometimes even a form of democracy, but in the background, they violently murder rivals, fight fierce battles with law enforcement, assassinate political opponents, facilitate addiction, employ children and teens, and so much more.
If you didn't know about the bad things drug cartels do, would you support them and love them like you do Google?
Because their core product - search, now sucks. Why? Page 1 is mostly ads. Compared to other search tools they are a much poorer user experience. Hell even Bing is better. They push their Bing chat based engine but you know what? It does a pretty good job without destroying what I came to do with the tool which is search for stuff.
oof I hope you sent this from a bunker.
funny thing is, a guy i went to jr high with (in calgary) 'invented' a program called bumptop. ~~a few years later~~ less than a year, the guy sold everything to google for a nice sum, and got a job. next android update...was basically bumptop. seems hes still doing well for himself, colour me a bit jealous lol